Lanthanum and the Ancients

[Gadrin]

Originally posted by Jeff M. Hopper:


Now, if my astronomy is remembered correctly, type-S stars have strong spectra for zirconium oxide and lanthanum oxide. This would mean that the solar winds from these stars would also have a high percentage of lanthanum oxide in their composition. So instead of digging in the dirt for the lanthanum bearing minerals, why not just set up a collector in a nice orbit around the type-S star and catch the wind?

would it be too much of a handwave to say that despite the infrequency of these star types, when they are found, they're likely to have a very high percentage that lanthanum will be found in those systems ? (someplace)

 

[Malenfant]

If we assume that the solar winds of the S-type stars carry Lanthanum Oxides to their planets (if they have any) then I guess over time it could pile up on the surfaces of those worlds.

S-types are the only ones that can have LaO in their makeup, and they're usually AGB stars (not every AGB giant is a carbon star or S-type though) - these are stars that have entered the very last stage of their lives (see my Stellar Evolution page for a summary). So they're not only rare, but also short-lived since stars don't spend a lot of time in that stage.

So that said, if they have planets then they'll be former outer zone worlds since all the former inner ones would have been consumed by the giant star - so there'd be melting iceballs, or gas giants that might have lost some of their atmospheres (and their satellites).

I'd imagine if you have a rockball like our moon somehow out there (unlikely), or an iceball that isn't melting, then the solar wind can get trapped in the regolith on the surface and it might be possible to stripmine it. But the period of deposition of LaO would only be a few hundred million years at most, and it'd still be pretty rarefied.

I doubt if this technique would be economical, you'd have to do a lot of work to get a little material. Lanthanum might be found in these systems, but it most likely wouldn't be in a form that is worth accessing.

 

[TheEngineer]

Hm, I doubt, that a solar wind is any kind of useful to create significant enrichments of Lanthanium or any other heavier element of a objects surface.
AFAIK solar wind composition is considered to represent the composition of the pre star-birth nebula, so nothing concentrated could be expected here as the wind carries all the other stuff, too.

Well, thats a question for Mal:
Is a LaO spectral line not just visible, because of the low temperature of a star (so that the oxide is somehow stable) ?

Perhaps it should be kept in mind, that Lanthanium is statistically just 4000 times as common as gold, so it might not be neccessary here to develop strange mining methods.
Ok, thats based on Earth data.

Maybe stars metallicy really could be used as a general hint....

Regards,

TE

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Originally posted by Gadrin:

would it be too much of a handwave to say that despite the infrequency of these star types, when they are found, they're likely to have a very high percentage that lanthanum will be found in those systems ? (someplace)

I'd say that there would be a higher percentage of lanthanum available in that system. Of course, YMMV.

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Thinking a bit, I'd like to offer another star mining Ancients device.

We know that the Ancients had teleportation units. So, set up two of them so that they only allow travel in one direction (from input at disk A to output at disk B) then make sure that the teleportation "tunnel" cannot be tapped into under any circumstances (for safety purposes). Now drop disk A into the type-S star (preferably near where there is stuff fusing to lanthanum as an end product) and place disk B in an orbit a safe distance away. Place large magnetic inductance rings around the outgoing side of disk B. Turn on the teleportation system - now hot fusing matter near disk A is sucked in and shot out of disk B through the coils. Use the coils to generate power from the fusing plasma shooting down them, making it a Big Damn MHD generator, and use that electricity to power the teleportation disks. The plasma will slow and cool with heavier matter slowing and cooling first (that'd be the lanthanum) which you siphon off with an electrostatic filter since the lanthanum is still a plasma. When you have enough lanthanum siphoned off, it is moved to another teleportation disk to be transported to a manufacturing site.

If you want to design it like a Russian liquid-sodium reactor (inherently unsafe IMHO), then just have disk A and B be part of a network and have the disk "flicker" and send the load of lanthanum. Of course if there is a failure, you have star-temperature plasma sprayed all over the destination world.

If you like to recycle your stellar plasma, the use two more teleportation disks to zap the plasma back into the star. This would probably also help to balance out the heat load you are generating by cycling all this plasma around.

Either way, the device would produce jets of matter that could probably be seen from light years away as they impact any interstellar gas around the star.

Damn, I wish Larry Niven read these boards...

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Just got home from work and am exhausted because I just know that there's got to be a way to use the temperature difference between disk A and disk B to generate power by a thermocouple arraingement...

I just can't think of it.

 

[tjoneslo]

Even the Ancients would need to be careful of stellar core mining. The core of a star is a delicate balance between gravity and heat pressure. By dropping a teleport disk into the core and removing some of the plasma, you cool the core ever so slightly, which causes the star to become unstable. Now you've got a variable star pulsing and the more you remove, the worse the pulsations get. Until the star goes nova, or super nova.

Now, in theory you could control the flucuations somewhat by turning the core teleport disk on and off to counteract the pulsations, but since the disk isn't going to be at the exact center, the "cooler" spots in the core will cause all kinds of weird flucuations.

I have to think there are easier ways of getting large supplies of Lanthanum than mining it from stellar core matierial.

 

[Malenfant]

Yeah, mining rare stars for at most a trickle of Lanthanum isn't a particularly sensible way to get the stuff. The best way to get it will be to go to planets, it's going to be more concentrated there than it'd ever be on a star. Plus, you don't have to find rare S-types to do it.

And TE - La may be more common than gold (on Earth), but that doesn't really mean much: gold at least can be concentrated in its native form, which makes it a lot more accessible than La which at best can only be found as a small part of specific silicate minerals.

 

[Gadrin]

Originally posted by Jeff M. Hopper:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Gadrin:

would it be too much of a handwave to say that despite the infrequency of these star types, when they are found, they're likely to have a very high percentage that lanthanum will be found in those systems ? (someplace)

I'd say that there would be a higher percentage of lanthanum available in that system. Of course, YMMV.

</font>[/QUOTE]okay, then I can work with that.

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi !

Well, appearantly there are even minerals with pretty high La concentrations (up to 33 %):

http://dc2.uni-bielefeld.de/dc2/lanthan/vorkomm.htm

Somehow the "rare" in the element group description is not meant so serious

regards,

TE

 

[Malenfant]

Yes, those are the ones already mentioned - monazite and bastnasite. And they are rare minerals.

I know people want to find ways to make naturally-occuring Lanthanum as common and easily accessible as say iron ore, but realistically it doesn't work like that. It occurs in small amounts in comparatively rare minerals, and the most of the time you're going to find it concentrated is in peculiar igneous intrusions and in placer deposits on the surfaces of large, wet, tectonically active worlds. The easiest way to get it is to locate and extract it from those deposits like we do today. Even though the Ancients have ubertech, they're not stupid - they'll go for the easiest way to get it too (assuming they don't just create it from scratch), there's no point in building huge "stellar extractors" when you can just go to a planet and strip mine it.

Obviously you can do what you like in your games, but that is the reality of Lanthanum.

 

[Gadrin]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Obviously you can do what you like in your games, but that is the reality of Lanthanum.

not to put you on the spot, but how do you account for what seems to be a rather generous amount of the material in your TU ? <I might need something to fall back on>

 

[Malenfant]

I don't

. My drives don't use Lanthanum at all, they use manufactured superdense elements. My "TU" is so divergent from the OTU that I can't even justify calling it Traveller - the only practical connection is that I used the FF&S tech architecture book to do the tech for it.

For the OTU it's just something you have to armwave, I guess. I have no idea how much Lanthanum is processed on Earth at any given time, or how much stuff you need to process to get say one gram of it. It sounds like Traveller ships need a lot of it for each drive though... if deposits that contain La can produce enough of it to support that kind of amount then great. If not, well, armwave

 

[Gadrin]

I can relate.

Overall I like Traveller, but it often becomes the "you can't do that" setting.

I prefer opening the flood gates from time to time, just for the change of pace.

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Originally posted by tjoneslo:
Even the Ancients would need to be careful of stellar core mining. The core of a star is a delicate balance between gravity and heat pressure. By dropping a teleport disk into the core and removing some of the plasma, you cool the core ever so slightly, which causes the star to become unstable. Now you've got a variable star pulsing and the more you remove, the worse the pulsations get. Until the star goes nova, or super nova.

Now, in theory you could control the flucuations somewhat by turning the core teleport disk on and off to counteract the pulsations, but since the disk isn't going to be at the exact center, the "cooler" spots in the core will cause all kinds of weird flucuations.

I have to think there are easier ways of getting large supplies of Lanthanum than mining it from stellar core matierial.

Good point, but considering the Ancients power and their alien mindset they may have just fiddled around with a star to see if they actually can make it explode. Just for fun, of course.

------------------------------------------------------

Hell, if star mining isn't suitable, then try nanotech. The Ancients seed a world with nanobots that are built to scour the crust clean of lanthanum and to von Neumann up some more of themselves while scouring. Once a set amount of lanthanum has been mined, the nanos programming changes and they assemble themselves into a teleportation disk. The lanthanum is them dumped on the disk and transported to a recieving facility.

The players first notice the effects of this process when the teleportation disk they have uncovered in an archaeological dig suddenly comes to life and a few thousand tons of pure, refined lanthanum materializes on top of it.

 

[Malenfant]

I don't buy the "just because they can do it, they will do it" approach to the Ancients. A lot of times people take the standard 'ancient precursor race' in scifi and just have them to wild, random, apparently pointless things for no good reason and then wave their arms and say "oh, but they're aaaaalien, with godlike-powers" as if that explains it all.

I don't believe that would be the case at all. The nanotech (or matter-forge) approach would make much more sense for them than star-mining - they're not going to mega-engineer a star for the sake of getting a few kilograms of Lanthanum. They may be alien, but they're not stupid - they're still going to do whatever requires the least amount of energy and effort to get the results they need.

And also, I don't see a reason to assume that the time and energy at their disposal is limitless. Or even that their morals would allow them to say reduce the entire crust of a planet to its component atoms just to get at its Lanthanum - especially when they could just manufacture the stuff from scratch. They may think that's total overkill, for all we know.

And in the Ancients' case specifically, IIRC Grandfather and his direct offspring were the ones with the big brains and technical knowhow - the rest of the race were just ordinary Droyne reaping the benefits of those really smart mutants. Maybe one of the offspring could try star-mining as a research project/folly, but the whole race isn't going to be up for it. Heck, most of the droyne around at the time would probably just continue to mine it conventionally.

I'm just trying to get people to step back from the "oh, they're Ancients, they can do anything for any random reason" approach here.

 

[Gadrin]

Don't they use heat/energy sinks in their teleportation ?

So if they "cool" portions of a star when teleporting something off it, they could in theory replace that energy with the teleportation energy from a different operation, possibly even simultaneously.

Anyway, I'm not really interested in Ancient Mining Techniques, I had originally wondered if they even used Lanthanum (period), because if they did, it could be a roadmap for modern players to follow, at least in the portion of space I'd place the players (namely the Core Expeditions).

 

[Malenfant]

To be honest I have no idea why Lanthanum would be so essential - maybe the starship operators manual explains why. But I'm having trouble seeing why it is required on its own as opposed to using a rare earth alloy or something. It is able to hold an awful lot of hydrogen in its structure - I dunno if MWM et all knew that at the time, I think that's a recent (post "cold-fusion") discovery - but then Palladium can do that also. And I from what I can gather Palladium actually stores a lot more hydrogen in its structure than La does.

So maybe Ancients use other materials like Palladium along with La to act as "hydrogen sponges" for their jump grids. But I can't see any reason beyond that to explain why Lanthanum is required to actually allow a ship to jump in the first place.

I suspect that Marc just picked an exotic element right at the start to use as a mcguffin (unless people were aware of its hydrogen absorbing properties back in the 70s). Lanthanum is most likely just Traveller's "dilithium", ditto for 2300AD's Tantalum.

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Originally posted by Gadrin:
Don't they use heat/energy sinks in their teleportation ?

So if they "cool" portions of a star when teleporting something off it, they could in theory replace that energy with the teleportation energy from a different operation, possibly even simultaneously.

To be honest, I've never seen it mentioned. Yet there has to be some kind of heat balancing tech inside of those teleportation devices just to keep them from killing their users.

Originally posted by Gadrin:

Anyway, I'm not really interested in Ancient Mining Techniques, I had originally wondered if they even used Lanthanum (period), because if they did, it could be a roadmap for modern players to follow, at least in the portion of space I'd place the players (namely the Core Expeditions).

Maybe a trail of star systems which have an unusually low amount of lanthanum in them? Or mineral formations which should contain lanthanum, but don't?

 

[jfetters]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
To be honest I have no idea why Lanthanum would be so essential - maybe the starship operators manual explains why. But I'm having trouble seeing why it is required on its own as opposed to using a rare earth alloy or something. It is able to hold an awful lot of hydrogen in its structure - I dunno if MWM et all knew that at the time, I think that's a recent (post "cold-fusion") discovery - but then Palladium can do that also. And I from what I can gather Palladium actually stores a lot more hydrogen in its structure than La does.

So maybe Ancients use other materials like Palladium along with La to act as "hydrogen sponges" for their jump grids. But I can't see any reason beyond that to explain why Lanthanum is required to actually allow a ship to jump in the first place.

I suspect that Marc just picked an exotic element right at the start to use as a mcguffin (unless people were aware of its hydrogen absorbing properties back in the 70s). Lanthanum is most likely just Traveller's "dilithium", ditto for 2300AD's Tantalum.

Yeah, this was one of the issues I had with it, too, and I think you are spot on with your last paragraph.

If memory serves, Lanthanum in CT was used for something referred to as "Jump Coils" but in the SOM that is what is used to create the "jump grid" on the hull. So its use changed over time within Traveller

Not being a fan of the glowing grid concept, I pretty much ignored that.

 

[Gadrin]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Actually, for once Anthony's mistaken (that said, so am I

)

A bit more rummaging around on the web reveals that Lanthanum is actually a lithophile element - that means it doesn't sink to the core, it instead gets left behind in the crust during planetary differentiation. So actually, you won't find it concentrated in metallic asteroids at all - exactly the opposite in fact. That makes it entirely uneconomical and largely pointless to try and get it out of asteroids too.

So asteroids aren't a convenient way to get Lanthanum at all - looks like the best best is in sedimentary deposits on earth-like worlds.

hmmm, well apparently GDW thought like you originally, as the Traveller Adventure has NPCs looking for Lanthanum in asteroids via mining.

STERNMETAL'S PLOT
Because of the recent increase in tension on the Zhodani
border, the Imperial Navy has asked for and been granted
a freeze in the price of lanthanum produced in the Imperium,
in an attempt to reduce the cost of stockpiling this vital
resource. Sternmetal Horizons has therefore experienced
reduced profits from their lanthanum mining operation in the
Patinir Belt.

from the Traveller Adventure page 23. No biggie, just need a little revision.

I think it talks about them finding it also on a world called "Feneteman" or something, which I've never heard of.